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Oysters with Bacon
Clean oysters, wrap a thin slice of bacon around each, and fasten with small wooden skewers. Put in a broiler, place broiler over dripping-pan, and bake in a hot oven until bacon is crisp and brown, turning broiler once during the cooking. Drain on brown paper.
This is the American form of the savoury the English called angels on horseback, and it hinges on one piece of vocabulary: in 1896 a "broiler" is a hinged wire grid, not the heating element in your oven.
- "Broiler" means a rackFannie Farmer's broiler is a double-sided hinged wire gridiron that clamps food between its halves, which is why she tells you to turn it. Use a wire rack set over a rimmed sheet pan and turn the oysters individually with tongs.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no oven temperatures in degrees; "hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the bacon crisps in roughly 8 to 10 minutes, which is about as long as the oysters can take before they tighten.
- The hinge: bacon before oysterThe dish fails when the bacon is still flabby and the oysters have gone rubbery waiting for it. Use thin-cut bacon, and if yours is thick, par-cook the slices until the fat has begun to render but they are still pliable, then wrap.
- SkewersSmall wooden skewers means what we would call cocktail picks. Soak them 20 minutes or they will scorch at this temperature; metal picks work and can be pulled out before serving.
- "Clean oysters"She assumes shucked oysters sold in liquor, not oysters in the shell. Drain them well and pat dry, or the bacon steams instead of browning. A pint of shucked oysters may hold anywhere from about twenty to forty, depending on size.
- Brown paperUnprinted grocery-bag paper was the standard draining surface. Paper towels do the same work.
- Yield and servingTwo to three per person as a savoury or hors d'oeuvre; the period often finished the dish on small squares of buttered toast, though this recipe does not call for it.
Bacon-wrapped oysters belong to the late-Victorian savoury course, the small salty dish served after the sweet at a formal English dinner, and are generally traced to the British angels on horseback, a name recorded in English cookery writing well before Fannie Farmer printed this version. That the recipe sits in the shellfish chapter of a Boston book rather than among the entrees is telling: New England oysters were still cheap and abundant enough in the 1890s to be treated as an everyday protein, sold shucked by the pint and cooked in quantity. The technique also reflects a coal-range kitchen, where a hinged wire broiler over a dripping-pan was the standard way to get direct heat around a small item without losing the fat that rendered out of it.